Please explain how laying off people can be a positive sign. If you can't or won't, please keep your negativity to yourself

It is a sign of cutting out the 'idealistic' crap, such as Java3d API and concetrating hard facts that really do need concentration. Java needs fast, reliable and beliaveble platform intependet 3d API. Java3d just didn't cut it.

The great part of Java is the easy and straightforwarc 'standard' library, however there is no way Sun could provide developers with up to date, fast, modern hw or sw graphics API along the same lines.

So, yes, Sun is merely taking out the unproductive units. The non-sound apples. I'm sorry if this sounds like a personal insult, which it may if you ever put your hopes on Java3d, but it is all for the best of Java as a language.

Thanks for the clarification. It didn't take it as a personal insult, but as an unnecessary harsh statement; with Sun laying off people we're not only talking about 3D API's but about people as well.But I agree with your point that Sun seems to be getting more 'down to earth' and practical these days, which in itself is a good point.You could have put that a bit better though However I do also appreciate the j3d effort even though it didn't work out as well as intended in the end but it certainly had its place (and still has in a way).

Yep and its not really focussed entirely on Java. Sun produces a LOT of stuff and there are plenty groups that could be shaved such that it would have no impact on things. While I was there talking to people, I discovered how much Sun really does and how large the company really is. Sun is still a pretty big company - probably bigger than their current needs(across the board - not in general).

The funniest (if you can find humor in these situations) thing is that during the layoffs, Sun is still actively recruiting and hiring people. So I would have to somewhat agree with the Captain and say this is a reasonably good thing. Would be nice if they could shift people around instead of firing them - but if a group hasn't made any money and doesn't look to have the potential to do so in the future - sometimes it makes sense to cut your losses.

Ahh, I don't see them getting into the home computer or console market without a heavy technology partnership with someone like Sony - they just don't have the experience to develop graphics hardware and the like - they've concentrated on getting raw calculation speed into their chips. Which every man and his dog do, nowadays.

If only they were able to make more money producing Java - that's where they're really making the most impact.

Yep but don't discount the impact that StarOffice and OpenOffice will have on the bottom line. There are many businesses who are looking at StarOffice and saying 'this is good enough and a crap load cheaper'. Sun through Star/Open Office finally have a nail that they can drive into the heart of Microsoft - something they've been trying to achieve for years. If they, through the Java Desktop thingy, get this version of office to the masses - they would deal Microsoft a serious blow on the balance sheets.

Yep but don't discount the impact that StarOffice and OpenOffice will have on the bottom line. There are many businesses who are looking at StarOffice and saying 'this is good enough and a crap load cheaper'. Sun through Star/Open Office finally have a nail that they can drive into the heart of Microsoft - something they've been trying to achieve for years. If they, through the Java Desktop thingy, get this version of office to the masses - they would deal Microsoft a serious blow on the balance sheets.

Yep but don't discount the impact that StarOffice and OpenOffice will have on the bottom line. There are many businesses who are looking at StarOffice and saying 'this is good enough and a crap load cheaper'. Sun through Star/Open Office finally have a nail that they can drive into the heart of Microsoft - something they've been trying to achieve for years. If they, through the Java Desktop thingy, get this version of office to the masses - they would deal Microsoft a serious blow on the balance sheets.

Good thoughts. A nail like in the good old Dracula movies. ;-)

The new Openoffice release candidates are pretty nice. I like the PDF export much.Thanks to SUN for the link "Staroffice <-> Openoffice". Also thanks to the German Stardivision to have invented Staroffice (some are in the Linux KDE team I think?). I use Staroffice / Openoffice for years now and it saves me time and money.

Why? Have you tried StarOffice yet? I have been using it since version 4.x. The current version is every bit as good as MS Office. No lie.

Did anyone see Jonathan Schwartz's keynote at SunNetwork? People asked just how interoperable StarOffice is with MS Office and he responded by going to Microsoft's website and opening up several documents from their site on stage.

I recently started using OpenOffice because I was always fighting with Word's 1001 wonderful ways of 'how to irritate people by screwing up your document by being "smart"'. Or things like that damn paperclip popping up when you're about to finish your 50 page document asking "It looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like some assistence?". Grrrrr: "NOOO SHUT THE F*CK UP. GO AWAY. I'M NOT WRITING A LETTER.".I never found *all* options I have to turn off to get rid of all that stupid nonsense .And after using OpenOffice for about 2 months I came to the conclusion I really like the OpenOffice's word alternative . It works like a breeze and I can open and save word docs without problems.

StarOffice 7 is certainly a good office replacement for what the vast majority of the world uses Office. I remember at the keynote at Sun network when the crowd was polled about how many people were using StarOffice/OpenOffice and there were lots of raised hands. When asked if the previous version was suitable - over 90% of those hands were still up and I think this was a surprised even to the Sun folks since they were about to talk about how cool the new version was

possible if you are starting fresh (maybe this Sun Java Desktop would do the trick - bosses like big name companies and it looks like the sysadmin job would be easier). Kinda sucks when there is just too much legasy (think: Visual Basic, Access, VBA) crap that you'd be there till your hair was gray.

I was able to swich most of my office to Mozilla which is a start (I just changed the shortcut so it still showed the IE icon ) and managed to rid us of the *insert custom expleetive here* known as MS Exchange.

In our office, MS Office is actively discouraged, and you aren't allowed it unless you have a really good reason (e.g. the finance people have a real need for Excel). The main reason is that we have people running a variety of desktop OS's (with good reason, not just on a whim!) and it's almost impossible to do document exchange etc with MSO products. We've also been bitten quite a few times where we sent MS Word documents (written entirely in MS Word) to a customer/partner/supplier and found that it didn't open/display properly their side.

All documentation etc is exported in XML, HTML and/or PDF - the latter for when it's destined for printed documentation. Happily, OpenOffice has supported "print as PS" since version 1.0, and "ps2pdf" works perfectly these days, both on linux and windows. Still, several of us are really looking forward to OO 1.1 and the File menu option "Save as PDF".

Experimentation shows that some bugs in Word are ONLY fixed when you are running windows XP - irrespective of the version of Word you're running!

Stuff like that is just far far too expensive for us to workaround (we can't fix it; it's MS's source code ) since we have less than a dozen employees. Open standards with editors/viewers that *actually work* are our only hope . Although linux software still sucks, and is riddled with bugs (OpenOffice 1.0.3 is extremely unstable, for instance), with everything saved as XML/HTML, we are spoilt for choice with editors and viewers, and can very easily (thanks to all the XML parsers) write our own custom renderers and processors.

And on that front, have you heard of FOP? It's an Apache implementation of the FO standard for formatting XML data. You should be able to write an XSL to turn your XML data into an FO document, then use FOP to render that straight to PDF.

It might be a useful thing to consider if you have a large number of documents to convert.

Happily, OpenOffice has supported "print as PS" since version 1.0, and "ps2pdf" works perfectly these days, both on linux and windows. Still, several of us are really looking forward to OO 1.1 and the File menu option "Save as PDF".

OO 1.1 final version has been released just a few days ago. I'm going to use it when its localization is ready. :-)

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Experimentation shows that some bugs in Word are ONLY fixed when you are running windows XP - irrespective of the version of Word you're running!

Yep, and the new "Office 2003" forces you to use Win2000-SP3 (but MS "recommends" WinXP) and if you want to use the application's team features you also need to use a Windows 2003 server. :-(

However, the harder MS tries to force their customers to do what MS wants them to do, the more they go away. There are enough people who are able to see Tolkiens "One Ring to rule them all" idea also in the IT market. In several European countries, for example, several government offices switched from MS to open standards and Opensource sofware like OO and Linux, with recommendations to others to do the same. Similar things happen in Asia, where (South-) Korea, Japan and China cooperate on an Openstandard/Opensource front (they intend to develop an own operating system which bases on Linux). Etc.

This leads to the original topic. Like Javalobby's Rick put it:

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I have a strong and growing sense that the era in which the Java value proposition will flourish is just about to arrive. We can see the beginnings of the fragmenting of Windows hegemony taking place already. For example, it is a big deal when several major Asian countries may decide to get together to pool resources and develop an operating system alternative that doesn't fill the coffers at Redmond any further! One thing I have confidence in is that Java will run on those systems, and I'm betting it will run really well! Those systems will serve hundreds of millions of people, if not billions.

This will be good to SUN, to all Java developers - and so also to us Java game fans. :-)

(By the way, I like the idea that Asia will show the IT world the way to go away from MS-Sauron. They, let's say Korea and Japan, already produce the best movies, so... :-)

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